Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970), known best as Rube Goldberg, was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor.

Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways, giving rise to the term Rube Goldberg machines for any similar gadget or process. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948 and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award in 1959.[1]

Goldberg was a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society,[2] and he is the namesake of the Reuben Award, which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year. He is the inspiration for various international competitions, known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to make a complicated machine to perform a simple task.

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Personal life

Goldberg was born July 4, 1883, in San Francisco, California, to Jewish parents Max and Hannah (Cohen) Goldberg.[3] He was the third of seven children, three of whom died as children (older brother Garrett, younger brother Walter, and younger sister Lillian also survived).[4]

Goldberg began tracing illustrations when he was four years old, and first took professional drawing lessons when he was eleven.[4]

Goldberg married Irma Seeman on October 17, 1916.[3] They lived at 98 Central Park West in New York City and had two sons named Thomas and George.

During World War II Goldberg's sons changed their surname, at Goldberg's insistence, because of the amount of hatred towards him stemming from the political nature of his cartoons.[5] Thomas chose the surname of George, in order to honor his brother; George, wanting to keep a sense of family cohesiveness, adopted the same surname. Thomas and George's children now run a company called RGI (Rube Goldberg Incorporated) to maintain the Goldberg name. John George (Thomas's son) is assisted by his cousin Jennifer George[6][7] (George's daughter) and John's son Joshua George to keep the family name alive.[8]

Career

Rube Goldberg with family, 1929

Goldberg's father was a San Francisco police and fire commissioner, who encouraged the young Reuben to pursue a career in engineering. Rube graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1904 with a degree in Engineering[1] and was hired by the city of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department. After six months he resigned his position with the city to join the San Francisco Chronicle where he became a sports cartoonist.[1] The following year, he took a job with the San Francisco Bulletin, where he remained until he moved to New York City in 1907, finding employment as a cartoonist with the New York Evening Mail.[4]

The New York Evening Mail was syndicated to the first newspaper syndicate, the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, giving Goldberg's cartoons a wider distribution, and by 1915 he was earning $25,000 per year and being billed by the paper as America's most popular cartoonist.[4]Arthur Brisbane had offered Goldberg $2,600 per year in 1911 in an unsuccessful attempt to get him to move to William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, and in 1915 raised the offer to $50,000 per year. Rather than lose Goldberg to Hearst, the New York Evening Mail matched the salary offer and formed the Evening Mail Syndicate to syndicate Goldberg's cartoons nationally.[4]

A prolific artist, Goldberg produced several cartoon series simultaneously, including Mike and Ike (They Look Alike), Boob McNutt, Foolish Questions,[9][10]What Are You Kicking About,[11]Telephonies,[12]Lala Palooza, The Weekly Meeting of the Tuesday Women's Club, and the uncharacteristically serious soap-opera strip, Doc Wright, which ran for 10 months beginning January 29, 1933.[13] The cartoons that brought him lasting fame involved a character named Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. In that series, Goldberg drew labeled schematics of the comical "inventions" that would later bear his name.

Cultural legacy

The popularity of Goldberg's cartoons was such that the term "Goldbergian" was in use in print by 1915,[15] and "Rube Goldberg" by 1928.[16] "Rube Goldberg" appeared in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language in 1966 meaning "having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance", or "deviously complex and impractical."[4]:118 The 1915 usage of "Goldbergian" was in reference to Goldberg's early comic strip Foolish Questions which he drew from 1909 to 1934, while later use of the terms "Goldbergian", "Rube Goldberg" and " Rube Goldberg machine" refer to the crazy inventions for which he is now best known from his strip The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, drawn from 1914 to 1964.[4]:305

The corresponding term in the UK was, and still is, "Heath Robinson", after the English illustrator with an equal devotion to odd machinery, also portraying sequential or chain reaction elements.

Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931)

Goldberg's work was commemorated posthumously in 1995 with the inclusion of Rube Goldberg's Inventions, depicting his 1931 "Self-Operating Napkin" in the Comic Strip Classics series of U.S. postage stamps.[17]

In the 1962 John Wayne movie Hatari!, an invention to catch monkeys by character Pockets, played by Red Buttons, is described as a "Rube Goldberg."

In the late 1960s and early 70s, educational shows like Sesame Street, Vision On and The Electric Company routinely showed bits that involved Rube Goldberg devices, including the Rube Goldberg Alphabet Contraption, and the What Happens Next Machine.[18][19]

Also in the Final Destination film series the characters often die in Rube Goldberg-esque ways. In the film The Great Mouse Detective, the villain Ratigan attempts to kill the film's heroes, Basil of Baker Street and David Q. Dawson, with a Rube Goldberg style device. The classic video in this genre was done by the artist duo Peter Fischli & David Weiss in 1987 with their 30-minute video "Der Lauf der Dinge" or "The Way Things Go".

Honda produced a video in 2003 called "The Cog" using many of the same principles that Fischli and Weiss had done in 1987.

In 2005, the American alternative rock/indie band The Bravery released a video for their debut single, "An Honest Mistake," which features the band performing the song in the middle of a Rube Goldberg machine.

In 1999, an episode of The X-Files was titled "The Goldberg Variation". The episode intertwined characters FBI agents Mulder and Scully, a simple apartment super, Henry Weems (Willie Garson) and an ailing young boy, Ritchie Lupone (Shia LaBeouf) in a real-life Goldberg device.

The 2010 music video "This Too Shall Pass – RGM Version" by the rock band OK Go features a machine that, after four minutes of kinetic activity, shoots the band members in the face with paint. "RGM" presumably stands for Rube Goldberg Machine.[20]

2012 The CBS show Elementary features a machine in its opening sequence.

2014 The Web Series, "Deadbeat," on Hulu features an episode titled, "The Ghost in the Machine," which features the protagonist, Kevin, helping the ghost of Rube Goldberg complete a contraption that will bring his grandchildren together after making a collection of random items into a machine that ends up systematically injuring two of his grandchildren so they end up in the same hospital and finally meet.

^Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. 1915 Vanity Fair The Goldbergian answer would be ‘No, I paint my nose and eyes red every day to frighten the gypsy-moths away.'|access-date= requires |url= (help)

^Atkinson, J. Brooks (10 February 1928). "THE PLAY; "Rain or Shine," Joe Cook". New York Times. p. 26. He then introduces the Fuller Construction Orchestra, which is one of those Rube Goldberg crazy mechanical elaborations for passing a modest musical impulse from a buzz.|access-date= requires |url= (help)